Adobe Needs to Stop Installing Malware

As an Adobe Flash developer I was appalled and offended when Brandon Potter told me that Adobe was installing software on users machines when they explicitly opted out of the install. Totally ridiculous, why would Adobe be doing that? Well I don’t know the answer to that but I can tell you that it is true. If you download the latest version of flash player Adobe will ask you if you want to install McAffee Antivirus. Even if you check no it will still install it… As a developer I chose Adobe as a platform I could trust as they did not do these kind of things in the past… Now I am having to re-evaluate that trust and with so many other alternatives for cross platform development like Silverlight I don’t know if I will continue to use Flash.

Full Story on Brandon’s Blog-Dear Adobe: This is NOT okay

Thanks
David Bates

Server Move, Vegas, New Baby, Work

Sorry I havn’t posted anything for a couple of weeks. I have both been busy at work and home. It almost seems like I have no time anymore. Let me catch you up real quick and hopefully I will be able to catch up on post so that you can read all the exciting news in depth.

I had a guest blogger as you can see from the previous post. This is a new area for me as I orginally intended this blog as a personal outlet. I now see that in the technology arena I am in sometimes it doesn’t hurt to bring in other folks and hear their ideas. The last post was a test of that. Since this site is getting a lot of hits from others besides my family I thought it wouldn’t hurt. Let me know if you liked his post or not and I will evaluate bringing in other talent again.

I went to Devconnections 2010 in Las Vegas last week… yeah I said VEGAS!! it was great I got to meet a lot of people in my industry which is rare and had time left over to take in Vegas and all of it’s wonderful sites. I had never been to Vegas as an adult so it was very exciting for me. I hope to go back again soon. DevConnections allowed me to learn a lot about web development, web services, and silverlight 4. You will be seeing my site switch from php/wordpress based to asp.net/silverlight based in the near future. I have secured serverspace with rackspace.com and am currently working the final stages of my own asp powered CMS. I will be selling this CMS as a value add to the customers that I already host to allow them a more robust system under their current hosting contracts. So those of you who host with me know an email is coming

Our new baby is coming soon as well 7 weeks and counting. My wife had me put up a be back banner on her page southernmama.com as well as create an e-invite platform for her babyshower coming May 8th. We have decided on the new baby’s name but I will not ruin the suprise here yet. Daniel keeps asking when “Baby ____ is going to come out and play” we can only laugh and reply soon.

Work is going well we are hiring new people and others are leaving. I will have my hands full soon, if I didn’t already, with training and managing. I am hoping that I will be able to do more managing and actual coding instead of data entry type stuff with the addition of new staff. We will see. I have been delving hard into sharepoint and want to switch our external site over to it but given our current constraints I don’t see that happening anytime soon. I have however been able to build a full youtube clone as well as a twitter-ish clone within sharepoint and I am working with SP webservices more. I just can’t get enough of this stuff even now I should be asleep but just can’t help myself researching and playing in tech. It is great to have your hobby also be your job

Well that’s all for now hopefully you are fast asleep or doing whatever is usual at this time in your timezone as for me I am going to search about CDN’s and silverlight smooth-streaming.

Thanks for reading
David Bates

Windows Phone 7 Series

So Windows is making a mobile operating system. Yes is the short answer, and it is brilliant but it seems up until now people never associated windows mobile with Microsoft maybe it was due to Microsoft itself never hyping the OS or maybe it’s the manufacturers fault. Who knows, who cares… As the local tech person for everyone I know I have had a lot of questions that start something like “why would Microsoft try to get into the mobile os business now? Is it because both Apple and Google have one? They must be trying to copy them huh?” I just smile and say well windows has been in mobile phones for a very long time… remember the Motorola Q? They all shrug and then say “yeah but it sucked”… and I say yes that is why they put so much effort into windows phone 7 series, because they needed to to stay in the game.

So now that I got their attention I delve into why Windows Phone 7 Series is an OS worth having such a long name. I think they got it right. First they are requiring the device manufacturers to have certain features like touchscreen, accelerometer, and three hardware buttons along the bottom. Then they are basing the phone on an already existing platform, Silverlight and XNA both of which are highly used on the xbox 360 Microsoft’s gaming platform. Finally they are making the tools free. This is a big step for Microsoft and you can still see on the http://developer.windowsphone.com/ they still charge $99 per year for developer access to legacy SDK’s and samples. What freelance developer wants to pay that… especially when Apple and Google both have free tools (Apple is not completely free as you have to buy an Intel mac) and the phone up till now did not have powerful processors or GPU’s. Windows Phone 7 Series even goes one step further to make the software on the phone support full multitasking or as some like to call it multi-APPing. Combine that with a slick UI and sound UI standards we have a real contender on our hands. I wish this phone would be released a lot sooner than the Christmas time-frame that they currently predict.

Now I have downloaded the SDK and even followed the keynote given at http://live.visitmix.com/ to make a picture viewing app. It worked great, was easy to follow given I already knew the tools from silverlight development and fast… on my computer the emulator outperformed any picture app I ever had on my IPhone. I can’t wait to see what comes of the app store and I hope that MS takes a hint from Apple and Google and decide to make it free to publish apps but charge for advertising and take a cut of sales. If so I’m in.

Thanks for reading
David Bates